Content management solutions facilitate the creation, storage, retrieval, promotion (e.g., through a review/approval and/or other business process or work flow), retention, migration, and/or destruction of content, typically in the context of a relatively large body of content. A wide variety of regulatory and other legal and/or business requirements prescribe a manner and/or duration of retention of certain content. In some environments, large volumes of similar content objects, e.g., email messages or other communications, ecommerce or other transaction records, stock quotes, etc. must be ingested relatively quickly into a content management system. A content management system typically uses a database, such as a relational database management system (RDBMS), to store metadata associated with content items (e.g., documents or other files or objects) under management of the content management system. In a typical content management system, for each such content item that is added to a body of content being managed by the content management system one or more objects must be created and/or associated data stored (or updated) in a database. Typically, each such addition and/or update may require one or more database queries to ensure that system configuration information and/or metadata required to be known to perform operations such as inserting a new object are known and up-to-date. Examples of such system configuration and metadata include, without limitation, information regarding what the current version of an object to be updated is; what the object identifier for an object (or set of objects) identified by folder name, access control list (ACL) name, policy name, etc.; what is the default policy, logical storage location, etc. for objects of type X, associated with user Y, etc.; and are there any default customizations (e.g., custom methods, attributes) that apply to this object? Particularly when large numbers of content items are ingested and/or modified by a content management system in succession, the same questions may be asked of the database over and over again. Some benefits may be realized by caching responses, but each such cache would require maintenance and each might have its own and potentially different caching/refresh policy.